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From a mailing list I'm on: someone had been trawling the Guardian Unlimited archives, and turned up this story about celebrity and music. Comments? Does this seem relevant?
quote eath of the star
Decca Aitkenhead
Guardian
Tuesday July 17, 2001
A hundred famous people spent last weekend on a marshland in Hackney, and each one - DJs, pop groups, solo acts - had to take turns on stage. A week before the Essential Festival, there was Party in the Park in London, and T in the Park in Scotland - not concerts so much as live versions of compilation CDs. Next month there will be Knebworth, and a line-up of 160 performers. With the exception of Madonna's bolt of lightning, our summer programme of musical entertainment resembles a series of gigantic outside broadcasts by Top of the Pops.
There now appears to be not a single act big enough to carry a major event on its own. The record industry, we are told, is no longer willing to invest in "real" bands, and has lost the heart for funding dreamy undergraduates through their acne and their 20s on the outside chance that they might turn into Oasis. Sales for traditional pop concerts have fallen by 15% this year. We are left with a compilation culture of one-hit turns by bands whose return to obscurity will be every bit as abrupt as their arrival in Now That's What I Call Music 39.
For readers of Q magazine, and all those who feel that they have a serious appreciation of music, this is a source of grave and infinite lament. The latest rumour that the Rolling Stones may have to cancel their 40th anniversary tour for lack of interest is instantly processed as bad news, another crushing blow to the reputation of contemporary taste. Disapproval has established itself as the only intelligent position on the decline in live performance - and yet, like most orthodoxies about popular music, it is less intelligent than it looks.
Those superstar monoliths with guitars, so admired for their artistic integrity, were only ever able to fill stadiums by commanding feverish, doe-eyed adoration among otherwise sensible people. It takes quite something for a fan to find £50 for a ticket, travel to Wembley and swoon at a muzzy outline on stage half a mile away - and you might say that something is not entirely balanced.
Fandom - "real" fandom - is a slightly disturbing condition, with its voluntary surrender of all perspective in exchange for a role in a relationship that, by definition, casts you as the unrequited fool. It is the sheer wilfulness of the choice that feels so uncomfortable - for although 14-year-old girls may reasonably claim to be in the grip of something bigger than themselves, no grown-up with a catalogued Frank Zappa collection and a photographic memory of every Captain Beefheart lyric can credibly suggest that they are enslaved to forces beyond their control.
Neither the Bob Dylan B-side statistician or the weepy Tom Jones housewife is the slightest bit embarrassed about sharing the details of their arrested development. They have no need to be. Middle-aged Elvis fanatics who wept when Lisa Presley married Michael Jackson are widely thought to be cute, or at least kitsch, rather than unstable.
But whereas the old-school obsessive is credited with integrity, the fickle young Heat reader who likes S Club 7 one week and Robbie Williams the next is regarded as an inferior enthusiast, and held to blame for fuelling that modern scourge, "celebrity culture".
Broadsheet-reading classes like to complain about celebrity culture. The objection is that we disapprove of people liking so many celebrities. There are too many - anyone can be a celebrity these days! - and, disgracefully, these impostors are admired more for their fame than their talent. The complaint is probably true, but it overlooks the possibility that we have become promiscuous about stars because they no longer matter so much.
Nineties dance culture is probably to thank for the decline of the sad, single-minded fan. In a scene where the excitement is generated almost entirely by the participants rather than the performers, the event is the event. In the same way, it is the common currency provided by celebrity that people value, rather than the representatives of it. This may explain an otherwise baffling paradox: that despite our prodigious appetite for stars, we are extraordinarily careless when it comes to choosing them. We'll have anyone - Big Brother evictees, Popstars hopefuls, sales assistants from docusoap shopping malls. This only makes sense if the point of celebrity culture is not them, but us.
Traditional music circles have always been scathing about dance culture's failure to produce people like Mick Jagger. Why this should be a deficiency, or disqualify it from grown-up music, remains a mystery, as opaque as the merits of Sir Elton John over DJ Timmi Magic. Why would anyone care if we don't make stars like we used to? Stars are only people we have invited to become monsters, stuck with a job for life as a freak, making fools of us. |
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